A Woman’s Guide to Identifying Psychopaths, Part 3
Appearance, Communication Styles, & Tastes

Ed Kemper

7,073 words

Part 3 of 8 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

The following should only be used to supplement the Hare Checklist-Revised, the real way psychologists diagnose psychopaths. It draws heavily on excerpts from interviews with the serial killer Ed Kemper. Kemper is an unusually intelligent psychopath whose IQ was tested at 136 and 145. He seems to be more honest, too, so he makes a good case study. It also cites examples of psychopathic behaviors in the Tate brothers, Jared Fogle, and the rapper 50 Cent. I’m not claiming these men are psychopaths; just that they engage in behaviors more common among psychopaths.

A short list precedes more in-depth explanations:

1. High width-to-height ratio of the face
2. Not manlier on average
3. Shorter on average
4. Physically resemble Machiavellians but not narcissists
5. Cool in stressful situations
6. Shorter noses with more upturned nostrils
7. Relatively long index finger relative to their ring finger (among men)
8. Lie more often, a trait negatively correlated with testosterone
9. Less likely to yawn when you do
10. Reduced startle response
11. Move less in their sleep
12. Bad sense of smell
13. Blink less
14. Move their heads less when speaking
15. Focus more on people’s mouths and less on their eyes
16. Often speak in a slow, controlled manner
17. Use fewer words related to anxiety; i.e., relating to being stressed, overwhelmed, nervous, scared, or uncomfortable
18. Use the past tense more often
19. Use more disfluencies such as “you know,” “um,” and “uh”
20. Insert causality where doesn’t belong using words like “because,” “since,” or “so that,” implying that something had to be done when it didn’t
21. Use more personal pronouns such as “I,” “me,” and “myself”
22. May view their memories differently than do others, and may see their roles as more grandiose
23. Struggle to tell whether someone is truly sad or afraid
24. Speak twice as often about basic needs like food, sex, and money, but less about family, religion, and social needs
25. More likely to be obese
26. Like bitter-tasting food and drinks such as beer, black coffee, celery, radishes, and peppermint
27. May be sensation-seeking and like spicy food
28. More likely to struggle with substance abuse and to develop social media and gambling addictions
29. More likely to binge drink
30. Teenage alcohol consumption may increase psychopathic behavior
31. May be antisocial motorists
32. May gravitate more toward extreme sports
33. The plot of Crank sheds light on what it’s like to be a thrill-seeker
34. More likely to engage in casual sex
35. Prone to sexual perversions, including voyeurism, sexual sadism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, and frotteurism
36. Often have bad health, including neurological disorders, chronic diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol
37. Have a slightly higher pain tolerance
38. Don’t respect personal space
39. Have more tattoos and piercings on average
40. Predisposed to considering plastic surgery, presumably cosmetic surgery in particular
41. Many are interested in transhumanism
42. Many like to troll people on the Internet
43. Inclined to stay up late
44. Prefer rap music
45. May like heavy metal music
46. May have lower aesthetic sensitivity to physical beauty
47. Do more “virtuous victim-signaling”
48. Often create complex and frequently convincing lies
49. Gaslight people
50. Don’t get mad – Get even
51. Some like to dominate conversations
52. Are more creative
53. Exhibit the following behaviors: charming people with compliments, being more talkative, stuttering when a topic touches on their vulnerabilities, changing the subject when they don’t feel in control, leaning in and using hand gestures, faking emotional expressions, expressing emotions that often don’t fit the situation, overgeneralizing, hinting at things the listener doesn’t know when intellectually intimidated, having a black-and-white worldview, contradicting themselves often, and telling half-truths

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1. The faces of psychopaths tend to be wide relative to their height. In other words, the horizontal distance between their cheekbones and/or jawbones is high relative to the vertical distance between their eyes and mouth. The results of composite face studies in figures 1 and 2 echo findings that psychopaths have wider faces. However, this is how they are on average, so not all psychopaths have these features, and of course not all people having wide faces are psychopaths.

2. Psychopathy has no correlation with testosterone, so psychopaths are not manlier on average. In figure 1 we see that the psychopathic face doesn’t resemble the high testosterone face, but the narcissistic face does.

3. Psychopathic men are shorter on average. This doesn’t mean that every short guy is psychopathic and every tall guy is normal, but perhaps it’s no surprise that white men are the tallest on average genetically, and among the least psychopathic as well. We may also surmise whence the term “Napoleon complex” comes, which people use to describe overly assertive short guys. Napoleon wasn’t short for his day, but he was psychopathic, and it seems the short men who inspired the term “Napoleon complex” are more likely to be.

Figure 1 “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most masculine of them all?” by Lyons et al., Personality and Individual Difference, vol. 74, February 2015, pp. 153-158.

4. In figures 1 and 2, we see that the psychopathic face resembles the Machiavellian face, but not the narcissistic face.

5. During times of stress, psychopathic men’s adrenal glands secrete less cortisol in response to stress. Women have more cortisol and it lowers testosterone, so during times of stress psychopathic men are manlier. Thus, they have an incentive to stir up trouble to make themselves situationally more dominant.

6. Figures 1 and 2 show that psychopaths tend to have have shorter noses with more upturned nostrils. Blacks’ nostrils are more upturned on average than whites, and they have a greater prevalence of psychopathy, although this could be a coincidence.

7. According to one study, men having a higher 2D:4D digit ratio are more likely to show psychopathic traits pertaining to a lack of remorse and empathy, a shallow affect, callousness, and a failure to admit guilt. This ratio refers to their index finger tending to be long relative to their ring finger. Women’s index fingers are normally longer than their ring fingers, and men’s ring fingers are normally longer than their index fingers, so if a man has a longer index finger relative to his ring finger, it is an effeminate trait. The longer index finger is thought to be the result of higher prenatal estrogen exposure. In this regard, psychopathic men are more like women, but in most cases, they are more like men.

Figure 2. “Facing a Psychopath” by Nicholas S. Holtzman, Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 45, no. 6, December 2011, pp. 648-654

8. One of psychopathy’s checklist items is pathological lying, and lying is negatively correlated with testosterone, so perhaps dishonesty is correlated with higher prenatal estrogen exposure in addition to a high 2D:4D ratio.

9. Psychopaths have a dysfunctional parasympathetic nervous system, making them less likely to yawn when you do, so if someone catches a yawn from you, it’s a good thing.

10. Psychopaths have a reduced startle response. Women are easier to startle than men, so psychopaths seem to be masculine in this regard.

11. Psychopaths move less when they sleep. There are several gene variants to do with moving during sleep on the BTBD9 gene. Maybe these variants negatively correlate with psychopathy.

12. Psychopaths have a bad sense of smell. Thus, they don’t seem to mind strong odors as much. If a guy wears strong, stinky cologne or reeks of cigarettes all the time, he may be mildly psychopathic. Additionally, women have a better sense of smell than men, so this is yet another way in which they resemble men more than women. Having said all this, I’ve seen one fairly psychopathic person express contempt for a stench, so we must remember correlation doesn’t always imply causation.

13. When people view things they like, they blink less. When they view things they dislike, they blink more. Normal people blink more when viewing videos of other people being mutilated, but psychopaths blink at about the same rate. Their lack of empathy goes deep, but it may help them fool people into thinking they have neutral feelings towards them despite secretly hating them. This is just one reason why interpersonal trust with a psychopath can be difficult.

Also, women blink more often than men — yet another way psychopaths are more masculine.

14. Psychopaths tend to move their heads less when they speak. Researchers intend to use image processing software and machine learning to obtain readings on the probability than an individual is a psychopath, or just how psychopathic they are based on their head movements. A possible example of a psychopath’s head and eye movements can be seen in this video of Jane Carter, Aaron and Nick Carter’s mother, whose pop-star sons accused her of defrauding them of their rightful earnings. In the interview concerning the ordeal, she almost never blinks and moves her head only slightly. She doesn’t appear to be emotionally upset.

15. Studies show factor 1 psychopaths show less attention to the eyes and more to the mouth. There are legitimate reasons to question the need for wearing masks during COVID, but because the most vehement mask opponents score lower on empathy and higher on callousness, two traits correlated with psychopathy, one must wonder whether they are having more trouble reading people because they can’t focus as much on their mouths.

16. Psychopaths often speak in a slow, controlled manner, showing little emotion. For example, murderer Brian Laundrie seems to speak this way on police dash cam footage when denying eyewitness reports that he struck Gabby Petito. They don’t always speak like this, though, as Ted Bundy was a psychopath and quite a fast talker.

17. Perhaps because they have shallow emotions most of the time, psychopaths use fewer words related to anxiety. They don’t often speak about feeling stressed, overwhelmed, nervous, scared, or uncomfortable about something. They are more likely to speak about being bored.

18. Psychopathic prisoners use the past tense more often. Researchers believe this shows they are emotionally detached from their crimes.

19. According to one study, criminal psychopaths use more disfluencies in their speech; i.e. connector words such as “you know,” “um,” and “uh.” It suggests they are thinking more about what they say and searching for the most artful way to say it. Young and nervous people also do this, however, so it’s not necessarily a sign of psychopathy. Beavis and Butthead — especially the mean one, Butthead — use a lot of connector words.

20. A study found criminal psychopaths use more conjunctions to do with cause and effect such as “because,” “since,” or “so that,” and so on, implying that the crime they committed “had to be done.” Serial killer Ed Kemper spoke to interviewers about a time when he was driving two hitchhiker women, but went a roundabout way because, according to him, if he had gone the way they wanted, it would have reminded him of previous murders he had committed after having gone the same way, which would have made him unable to resist the temptation to murder them. Psychopaths insert cause and effect where it doesn’t belong.

The odd thing is that Kemper may be telling the truth about not being able to control himself. Several of psychopaths’ sociobiological factors predispose them to impulsivity, including reduced activity in the orbital cortex, a larger striatum, the MAOA-L genotype, and higher dopamine levels (see Part 1). It may actually be difficult for them to stop some behaviors when they start them. This can be a useful skill. Going to the refrigerator to get a treat but then returning it, or picking up alcohol in a shop and then deciding not to buy it are redemptive behaviors. Inhibition is a friend in the right circumstances.

21. According to one source, volume reduction in regions of the brain common among psychopaths “has been linked to impairments in self-referential experiences.” This may be why psychopaths make fewer references to other people and talk a lot about themselves. Hence, they use more personal pronouns such as “I,” “me,” and “myself.” Of course, Kemper discusses his murders by usually referencing his own point of view and not anyone else’s.

22. According to the same source,

volume reductions have been linked to impairments in episodic memory and in self-referential experiences perhaps meaning that psychopaths view their own memories differently than do others and perhaps see their roles in those memories differently (perhaps as more grandiose). The deficits in emotions seen in psychopaths have also been linked to decreased grey matter volume in parts of the brain.

Kemper recalls how his murderous actions wouldn’t seem real the following day. Kemper also brags about how lucky he was in getting away with his murders, and how he could have been caught or stopped several times but wasn’t, seeing his actions as having been better than they deserved to be seen as.

23. Psychopaths struggle to tell when a person is genuinely sad or afraid. For this reason, they don’t react much when people express these emotions, and may even chastise people for doing so. In this regard, they are somewhat emotionally braindead.

24. A study found that “psychopaths use words related to basic needs, i.e., food, sex, and money, twice as often as non-psychopaths,” but were “less likely to use words related to family, religion, and social needs.” In other words, they are more motivated by fleshly desires. This is an advantage in their sexual numbers game, because basic things like money and food appeal to everyone, especially the women they’re trying to attract. Referring to their family and friends not only alienates people unfamiliar with them, however, but reminds them of the social structure that might judge their one-night stands as taboo. Finally, speaking about religion doesn’t make much sense, either, since most religions forbid people from engaging in short-term psychopathic breeding strategies. Indeed, part of being antisocial is supplanting social concerns with bodily ones.

25. Perhaps because they are so concerned with food, psychopaths are more likely to be obese. Some people are predisposed to putting on more weight for reasons they can’t help, such as advanced age, a stressful job, gut bacteria, or genetics, so we shouldn’t assume all overweight people are psychopathic or assume their actions are entirely to blame for their condition.

It is fine to mock gluttonous habits, however. For example, the only people I’ve ever seen carry a bottle of cola in their pocket are morbidly obese — and they’re the only ones to pack a sidearm to fend off sugar cravings.

26. Psychopaths like bitter-tasting food and drinks such as beer, black coffee, celery, radishes, and peppermint. I could never understand why people like Necco candy wafers. Now I can guess.

27. Psychopaths are sensation-seeking. Interestingly, sensation-seekers like spicy food. It makes sense as spicy food creates more of a disturbance in the mouth than a flavor. The YouTube channel featuring interviews with celebrities eating hot wings with escalating levels of hot sauce probably appeals to both thrill-seekers and guests.

28. Perhaps because of psychopaths’ chronic brain underarousal, they are more likely to engage in substance abuse and develop social media and gambling addictions. They like their alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, Twitter, poker, porn, etc.

29. People scoring high in impulsivity are more likely to engage in binge drinking. Presumably, psychopaths would be more prone to binge drinking. Routine binge drinkers condition their livers to withstand high alcohol consumption, so even if others can keep up with their spirit-guzzling, they will be have more of a hangover the next day.

30. Adolescents who grow up drinking alcohol seem to develop psychopathic personality traits in conjunction with their drinking. According to one study, “evidence indicated that during years when adolescents consumed more alcohol than normal, they experienced higher than usual levels of self-reported psychopathic features at the subsequent assessment.” There seems to be a bidirectional relationship between alcohol consumption and psychopathic tendencies. Ed Kemper describes his mother as an alcoholic whose condition drove away her three husbands.

31. Psychopaths are antisocial motorists. According to one article, a study showed that:

Individuals with psychopathic traits had higher rates of traffic violations and more aggressive driving behavior. In addition, those with lower levels of empathy, greater impulsiveness, and sensation-seeking were more likely to act out aggressively. Furthermore, those with psychopathic traits were less likely to engage in prosocial driving behavior.

The person cutting you off, tailgating you, and slowing down in front of you to intimidate you is more likely to be a psychopath, while the person letting you change lanes is likely not a psychopath. Psychopaths are more or less the opposite of altruists.

One of the most psychopathic things to do is to speed in residential areas, where hitting a pedestrian is more likely. Whenever thrill-seeking is combined with lack of empathy for others, there is the greatest potential for harm.

32. Individuals scoring higher in impulsivity, a trait associated with factor 2 psychopathy, tend to enjoy more risk-taking, and as such may gravitate more toward extreme sports. The reason Salt Lake City, Utah has among the worst drivers in America is probably not the Mormon faithful but the fact that there are many ski resorts in the region that attract thrill-seekers. This pool of people contains a higher percentage who not only seek more thrills in socially acceptable ways, such as on the ski slope, but socially unacceptable ways as well, such as on the road. Thrill-seeking by itself, when it doesn’t have the potential to hurt anyone else, doesn’t seem that problematic, but when one is callous and doesn’t care about putting others at risk, then it becomes antisocial.

33. The plot of the movie Crank encapsulates something of what it’s like to be a thrill-seeker. It is about a hitman who is poised by the mafia with a drug that will kill him if he doesn’t keep his adrenaline high for 24 hours. To do this he pursues violent revenge against his enemies, gets in many gunfights with gangsters, takes drugs (crank is a euphemism for meth), and has exhibitionist sex. He exhibits a need for stimulation, fearless dominance, and eschews a long-term perspective, and is impulsive and irresponsible. These are associated with factor 2 facet 3 psychopathy. Individuals having these qualities don’t need stimulation to keep living, but they need it to feel alive and to escape their low-resting brain activity. Being in “flight or fight mode” is when they feel most alive. To quote Napoleon, “There is joy in danger.”

Crank (2006) – Official Trailer

34. Psychopathy factors into sociosexuality or a proclivity toward having casual sex. This is because psychopathic individuals avoid bonding with partners, pursue new ones, and succeed in getting new ones more easily. The poster boy for this is the deceased John McAfee, creator of the McAfee antivirus software, who before his alleged suicide claimed to have sired 47 children — obviously not all with the same woman. More women than average are attracted to entrepreneurs and businessmen like McAfee.

35. Psychopathic traits correlate with paraphilia or sexual perversions. This includes voyeurism, sexual sadism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, and frotteurism. The meaning of all of these is common knowledge except for frotteurism, which is a rare perversion involving rubbing one’s private parts against a non-consenting adult.

Dance clubs frequented by African-American men are probably where frotteurism is most common in the form of dry-humping women on the dance floor. To quote 50 Cent from his hit single “In Da Club,” “So come give me a hug, if you into getting rubbed.” Then again, that sort of dancing is the norm in some environments, meaning the rubbing would be consensual. High School High makes fun of the dry-humping dance styles of black youths in the 1990s. To answer parents’ objections over 2000s-era sexual vulgarity in the entertainment industry, Eminem remarks in “The Real Slim Shady”:

Of course they’re gonna know what intercourse is
By the time they hit fourth grade
They’ve got the Discovery Channel, don’t they?

Psychopathic traits such as superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, and being manipulative predict interest in voyeurism and exhibitionism. The most famous movie concerning voyeurism is Porky’s, which involves high school boys going to a strip club, but it also has a subplot about them spying on the girls showering after gym class. The villains are Porky, a devious strip club owner, who teams up with his crooked cop brother to con them out of money; and Beulah Balbricker, a fearsome female gym teacher who catches them peeping at the girls through a hole in the wall of their shower.

Going to strip clubs is voyeuristic, and getting aroused around other people is exhibitionistic. Strip clubs aren’t faring well these days, because high-speed Internet offers greater voyeurism without any of the exhibitionism, and more people seem to be into the former than the latter. A much higher proportion of people watch Internet pornography than go to strip clubs, though. In 2011, one study showed that about one in five men had frequented a strip club in the past year, whereas 98% of men in relationships reported having watched porn in the past six months. Almost every guy watches porn now and then, but no more than one out of five go to strip clubs. Even though one could argue that those who go to strip clubs are more psychopathic, yet watching porn says almost nothing about a person, it is still a bad thing because men need to conserve their sexual energy for women, who are pickier and harder to win over than they’ve ever been.

Sexual sadism, which includes dominating others, correlates with the lifestyle aspects of psychopathy: need for stimulation, a parasitic lifestyle, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, and irresponsibility. Serial killers may have an extreme form of this because they usually prey upon the gender to whom they feel attracted, which in the case of Ted Bundy and Ed Kemper was women and in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy was men. Gacy was definitely a sexual sadist, because he brutally tortured his victims before killing them.

Now, serial killers are very rare, so it’s paranoid to suspect that people who are a little impulsive, irresponsible, and so on of being serial killers. Only in the event that they score 20 or higher on Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised would the likelihood seem to be higher.

Pedophilia is associated with factor 1 facet 2 psychopathy, which includes a lack of remorse, empathy, or guilt. Conspiracy theorists’ favorite target is pedophiles. They like to rave about pizza parlors, Jeffrey Epstein, and satanic pedophile rings whose members they can’t name. The most effective way to combat pedophilia, however, is to reduce the gene variants associated with it, and perhaps psychopathic tendencies which correlate with it, such as showing a lack of remorse, empathy, or guilt. The only problem is that gene variants can code for good or bad things depending on the environment and the other genotypes present. Eliminating bad things could also mean eliminating good things. Tampering with a genome could have unintended consequences, but all this discussion is moot because setting up such a eugenicist system will likely never be politically feasible. Thus, maybe the best we can do is try to catch another Epstein. Although African-Americans are probably a lot likelier to be pedophiles than Jews like Epstein, and there’s no evidence that Jews are more likely to be such than whites.

Nevertheless, Jews are more likely to be famous, so it seems like more celebrity pedophiles are Jews. The director Roman Polanski is one example. Another is Jared Fogle, who the American corporate sandwich chain Subway hired to be their spokesman in commercials during the 2000s. Subway let him do this because he claimed to have lost a lot of weight by eating nothing but 2,000 calories’ worth of Subway sandwiches each day. As we’ve seen, psychopaths are likelier to be obese. Fogle seems to have replaced this taste for gluttony with a taste for underage children. While gluttony makes people fat, unhealthy, and thus a burden to the healthcare system, pedophilia directly harms others and does so much more acutely — sometimes ruining a person’s sexuality for the rest of their lives. Fogle, and more importantly his victim, would have been better off if he had remained a glutton and not become a pedophile.

Moreover, Subway uses polyunsaturated fat in their food (most notably soybean oil in their mayonnaise), which has been linked to obesity and bad health, so people shouldn’t eat at Subway daily like he did. He was quite the con artist to parlay his weight loss into a multi-million-dollar fortune and celebrity status. Who knows whether he really ate Subway every day? Those people who silently lose weight and don’t try to become celebrities in the process are probably humbler and less psychopathic on average.

Today, Jared Fogle is staying thin on prison food, which probably doesn’t inspire gluttonous eating habits.

36. Psychopathy is correlated with bad health. According to one study:

Higher scores on the psychopathic personality traits scale were associated with a significant reduction in general health and significant increases in chronic diseases, neurological disorders, and disease. Those with psychopathic traits were also more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

If a person has bad health, they are more likely to die young. One article argues that this therefore makes them more likely to engage in psychopathic behaviors, including promiscuity, to breed as often as possible before they die. They live the fast life because their lives go by fast(er). To quote Napoleon, “Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever.”

37. Psychopathy correlates with a slightly higher pain tolerance. One would expect this to help them better endure punishment in full-contact sports such as American football, hockey, boxing, mixed martial arts, and rugby.

38. Psychopaths don’t respect personal space. They often stand too close for comfort. Their weaker amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for producing disgust, may make them less disgusted with the other person’s breath, body odor, and so on. Here are some examples:

Boxers often stand very close to each other for prefight promotional photos. The higher pain tolerance associated with psychopathy would come in handy, given that a man’s head is the primary target in that sport.

US military drill sergeants like to get in the faces of the recruits and yell at them. All that vain yelling isn’t stopping non-whites from flooding white nations.

Swedes tend to stand far apart from each other, while Arabs stand very close to each other. Given that gene studies have shown that Swedes’ ancestors were more monogamous, and that monogamy is negatively correlated with psychopathy, Swedes may be less psychopathic than Arabs.

39. A study from the University of Zagreb showed that people having tattoos and piercings scored higher on a psychopathy scale. Tattooed people outscored heavily pierced people, and people with tattoos on their necks, hands, and other places that are visible when fully clothed outscored people with more discreet tattoos. In general, the more irrevocable and immodest the body modification, the more psychopathic the individual tended to be. To corroborate this, another study showed that individuals having over a quarter of their skin covered in tattoos are more likely to exhibit antisocial and sadistic tendencies, both correlates of psychopathy. Having said all this, I’ve met some good people who were heavily inked, and we must remember that correlation doesn’t always imply causation. While tattoos have historically been more common among non-whites, there is some evidence that whites in ancient times had them. For example, Otzi the Iceman, whose DNA approximates best with Sardinians, had 57 tattoos.

40. Psychopaths are more likely to consider plastic surgery. Reconstructive surgery, such as fixing a broken nose after a fall, is probably less correlated with psychopathy than surgery performed for purely cosmetic reasons to alter the shape of one’s nose, jawline, breasts, lips, etc.

41. Psychopaths, along with their other two comrades in the dark triad, narcissists and Machiavellians, tend to be more interested in transhumanism, which is the merging of man and machine. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is a self-proclaimed transhumanist. It goes beyond his affinity for the transhumanist video game Cyberpunk 2077. He is investing in something called Neural Lace, which is a thin mesh that can move around in someone’s brain and directly translate brain activity into some sort of output. The goal is to integrate this technology with thoughts. One must wonder whether it’s a two-way street — whether the technology will control thought more than vice versa.

42. Psychopaths, along with other members of the Dark Tetrad, which includes narcissists, Machiavellians, and sadists, are more likely to troll people on the Internet. In a way, they are transhumanists using machines to empower themselves. For those who don’t know, trolling is posting comments designed to upset people needlessly or to disrupt a conversation, but people also use the term to describe any sort of mockery or jesting. Andrew Anglin, for example, is known for leading troll raids on various websites whereby his troll army temporarily dominates their comment sections until their webmasters can stop it.

It’s hard to say to what extent psychopathy motivates political trolling. Psychopathic trolling is not mere raillery, but exhibiting a mean-spirited lack of empathy. Leftists are at least as guilty of this as Rightists, if not more so. For example, some non-white men attempt to justify the killing of Ashli Babbitt by saying things like “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” For those who don’t know, an African-American security guard named Michael Byrd shot her dead even though she was unarmed, and according to her family’s attorney, not an imminent physical threat to anyone’s life. Byrd essentially killed her for trespassing, and what’s even more disgusting is that the government didn’t convict him of any wrongdoing. The hypocrisy of convicting the white police officer Derek Chauvin with murder for placing his knee George Floyd’s neck (which no solid evidence shows led to his death or was intended to kill him), yet not convicting the trigger-happy Byrd of anything at all, speaks to how corrupt the legal system is and how hypocritical the media and Left are for supporting it.

43. Night owls are more likely to be psychopaths. Missing a night of sleep increases dopamine in the brain, and since psychopaths receive a higher hit of dopamine from amphetamine than neurotypicals, maybe they get more of one from staying up late as well. As possible evidence of their nocturnal nature, sex crimes are more common at night, and bar crowds grow rowdier as they near closing time. Given that bad things happen at night, perhaps this is why folklorists called the period between 3 and 4 AM the “witching hour” — the time when witches, demons, and ghosts are supposed to be more powerful. Of course, we mustn’t impugn the character of all night owls, because intelligent people and young people (particularly young men) are also likelier to be night owls, and most of them aren’t psychopaths. It’s interesting, though, that psychopaths exhibit yet another behavior more common among young men.

44. Psychopaths tend to like rap music more than rock music. Individuals scoring high on the fearless dominance aspect of factor 2 psychopathy especially like rap music. In a way, rap is vocalized fearless dominance. According to criminologist Matt DeLisi, psychopaths “talk over you in a brusque, aggressive style.” If that’s not rapping, then I don’t know what is.

In one study, psychopaths tended to like Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” but not Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing.” “Lose Yourself” has a strained, small-minded, dark energy, while “Money for Nothing” has a free-spirited, emotional energy with more of a melody. According to Richard Lynn, processing melody requires more intelligence than processing bass and rhythm, and psychopaths have lower average IQ, which may explain part of their preference for rap. But it seems their flat emotions may translate to less of a preference for melody, just as how when one feels less emotional, one’s voice is flat.

Just to qualify this entry, Eminem doesn’t seem at all like a psychopath to me. His music appeals to many people. But for some reason, psychopaths are more likely to like it. He uses more shocking lyrics at times, but he doesn’t rap as much about sex, food, drugs, and money as much as many other rappers do.

The lyrics of 50 Cent’s hit single “In Da Club” are very psychopathic. By my count, 36 out of 65 lines concern money, sex, alcohol, or drugs. The chorus is:

You can find me in the club, bottle full of bub’
Look, mami, I got the X, if you into takin’ drugs
I’m into havin’ sex, I ain’t into makin’ love
So come give me a hug, if you into getting rubbed

50 Cent is a businessman today, still riding on the fame “In da Club” brought him. Now middle aged, he has cleaned up his image. Bottles full of bub, ecstasy, and womanizing are no longer part of his brand.

Any rapper could have rapped “In da Club.” Autotuned, ebonic fearless dominance is not what makes most rap songs popular; it’s the beats. According to Wikipedia, the author of the keyboard parts for “In Da Club” was a Hispanic man, Mike Elizondo, and the beat’s author was DJ Quik. They’re the people who made 50 Cent famous. 50 Cent’s only talent was maneuvering his way into the orbit of Dr. Dre and others who linked him up with good music-makers.

2000s-era rap seems to have the most psychopathic lyrics of any music genre, because they focus the most on sex, money, food, alcohol, drugs, and so on. It’s funny how the same woke media which marketed this to teenagers now sanctimoniously reprimands white advocates for hate. They promote things that weaken whites and forbid things which could strengthen them.

45. Psychopathic people often like heavy metal music. In general, they like “problem music,” which includes rap. It would be interesting to see if different music affects different regions of the brain, and if so, whether problem music lights up the psychopath brain more than other music styles. Regardless, in real life Alex from A Clockwork Orange would be more likely to listen to Rammstein or Eminem than Beethoven.

While music that has more bass and less melody, such as heavy metal and rap, may appeal to psychopaths, it seems that some lyrics may do so more according to their lyrics. For example, Dock Boggs’ “Country Blues” channels a psychopath’s sentiments. By my count, 19 out of 40 lines concern money, women, alcohol, food, or jai — things upon which psychopaths dwell. Here are two stanzas:

When I had plenty of money, good people,
My friends were all standing around,
Just as soon as my pocket book was empty,
Not a friend on earth to be found. . . .

Give me corn bread when I’m hungry, good people;
Corn whiskey when I’m dry;
Pretty women a-standing around me;
Sweet heaven when I die.

46. Researchers speculate that psychopaths may have lower aesthetic sensitivity to physical beauty. They attribute this to psychopaths having an inability to take a disinterested view of things. Being disinterested presumes the individual is impartial and appreciates the universal good for itself. Psychopaths are very self-interested and have a strong sense of self-worth, so they are less apt to waste their time appreciating beauty unless they can benefit from it.

47. Psychopaths do more “virtuous victim-signaling.” Bill Cosby pokes fun at his father for doing this, claiming that whenever he’d ask him for money, his father would lapse into a diatribe about how when he was a little boy, he “walked to school at 4 o’clock every morning, uphill both ways in five feet of snow, and he was thankful.”

Tristan Tate, brother of popular TikTok personality Andrew Tate, practices virtuous victim-signaling as a contestant on a desert island reality TV show, stating that he learned not to be lazy from kickboxing trainers who’d punish him if he didn’t work hard.

48. According to one metanalysis, psychopaths often create complex and often convincing lies. A 21-year-old Andrew Tate does this on the United Kingdom’s Ultimate Traveller reality TV show. In one scene, his fellow traveler Chloe runs out of money and asks him for some. He has a lot, because he had won the “ultimate traveler” prize the previous week, but he doesn’t want to share it because he’s saving it for the upcoming week, when he gets to hang out with other contestants he likes better. He tells Chloe that he accidentally left most of his money in the pocket of a pair of pants he had dropped off at the cleaners, and suggests that the workers will probably not return it, so he says he can only give her a portion of the small sum that wasn’t in his pocket. Because the cleaners could conceivably return the money, he gives himself an alibi for spending all of his money over the following week. He is thus able to stingily withhold money, but excuse offering a little, so he can stay in her good graces and use her support at the end to win the prize.

49. Psychopathic individuals are more likely to gaslight people. Typically, the gaslighter is incompetent at doing something, or has been caught doing something he shouldn’t do. He stubbornly tries to bend the perception of reality in the minds of his critic, and sometimes he even tries to blame his critic for his wrongdoing. The gaslighter is so confident in doing this that he sometimes causes the critic to doubt his sanity. If the critic is unintelligent, the gaslighting often works, but if the critic is too smart for it, the gaslighter can still stun him for long enough to make an escape. If the critic is particularly ardent in going after the gaslighter, the gaslighter may try to convince others that the critic is dangerous or crazy.

A funny song concerning gaslighting is “The Drunkard’s Special,” in which a wife tries to gaslight her husband into thinking he’s crazy for noticing signs that she’s having an affair. It starts from his perspective:

First night that I went home
Drunk as I could be
There’s another mule in the stable
Where my mule ought to be

Come here honey
Explain yourself to me
How come another mule in the stable
Where my mule ought to be?

Oh crazy, oh silly!
Can’t you plainly see?
That’s nothing but a milkcow
Where your mule ought to be

I’ve traveled this world over
Million times or more
Saddle on a milkcow’s back
I’ve never seen before

50. Factor 1 psychopaths don’t get mad; they get even. Tristan Tate, brother of charismatic TikToker Andrew Tate, is a 34-year-old millionaire who got rich by running an OnlyFans consultancy and casino. In one video, he claims a Hungarian girl expressed strong and lengthy anti-black sentiments on a date with him. Tristan Tate’s father is a light-skinned African-American man who definitely has more than the 20% white blood typical among US blacks. Because his father is basically half white, Tristan is essentially a quadroon, having approximately a quarter black ancestry. He was lucky and inherited light skin genes from both parents, so he can pass for white, or at the very least Hispanic. Rather than get angry with the woman for expressing anti-black sentiments, Tristan lured her into having sex with him that night. Pleased with the affair the following morning, she said, “I can’t wait to see you again.” He replied, “Once you go black, you never go back.” To quote Napoleon, “The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.”

51. Factor 1 psychopathy predicts dominating a conversation, while factor 2 psychopathy is associated with speaking less. People high in factor 1 psychopathy are likelier to have the glib charm and to be talkative, but I find that most people secretly wish they’d shut up or at the very least talk less. They’re saying to themselves, “Is he done yet?” To quote Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Everyone else waits politely for the psychopathic individual to finish — and sometimes wait in vain. There ought to be a timer people use in conversations like in a chess match to ensure that one player doesn’t take too much time. We shouldn’t suspect every long-winded person of being psychopathic, because they may merely be an autistic person “sperging out,” or they may just like to describe things in great detail or comprehensively, but if the quantity of words outpaces the quality, then that person needs to shut up.

52. Psychopaths tend to score higher in metrics of creativity. Their disinhibition may enable them to come up with ideas that others can’t. Thomas Edison was undoubtedly a creative person, but he acted like a total psychopath toward Nikola Tesla by attempting to suppress his idea of making use of alternating current, which has since become the standard mode to transmit electricity. Overall, Edison did more good than bad things, but sometimes it seems that those who do great good often do great harm as well.

53. Gullhaugen and Sakshaug conducted a metanalysis of 35 studies on psychopathic behaviors which reveal that psychopaths exhibit the following behaviors [my commentary is in brackets]:

Charming the listener [often with compliments]

Talkativeness [probably truer of the more extroverted ones]

Occasional stuttering when the topic touches on their vulnerabilities

Sudden shifts in the subject of conversation when they do not feel in control

Leaning in and frequent use of hand gestures

Non-genuine emotional expressions [awkward or noticeably faked vocal intonations, often feigning congeniality]

Expression of emotions unrelated to the context or topic [jocular despite others’ suffering]

Drawing conclusions based on limited information [they’ll sometimes emphasize one word you said as proof that you’re bad, wrong, etc.]

Hinting at factors the listener knows nothing about [especially when intellectually intimidated]

Black-and-white worldview

Tendency to generalize

Self-contradictions

Omitting essential details [i.e., telling half-truths]

It’s odd that people as detached as psychopaths tend to do so many dramatic things in order to appear more engaged than normal people. That’s really what psychopaths are all about: going from being bored to being exhilarated.

Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butthead, as well as Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, lampoon naïve adults who assume that antisocial behavior among youth is always due to ignorance or confusion. In the case of the dullards Beavis and Butthead, it often is, but in the case of Alex, the thug from A Clockwork Orange, it’s not. Malice is something that is inborn to some extent. Sure, bad environments bring it out in people, but some are naturally disposed towards it. The problem of evil is something of a sociobiological problem.

The least bad aspects of psychopathy seem to be aspects of facet 3, including a need for stimulation, impulsivity, irresponsibility, and lack of realistic long-term goals. Men who exhibit these behaviors would seem to be the most redeemable.

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